TEEN HIKER COMPLETES PACIFIC CREST TRAIL TREK IN 122 DAYS

Every through-hiker gets a nickname, and Jace Mullen’s belied his age: When the Oceanside resident set out from the Mexican border in May, he was 17 — perhaps the youngest solo hiker on the trail this year.

And that was fine with him. Mullen embraced his role, and went on to show the old folks (in their 30s) how it was done, burning through dozens of miles of trail every day and finishing almost a month ahead of schedule.

It’s difficult to explain the scope of the Pacific Crest Trail, which traces the highest points in the westernmost mountains of the Lower 48. It was 2,650 miles long — a few miles longer this year, thanks to a washed-out bridge in Washington — and rather than proceeding in a straight line from Canada to Mexico, it weaves its leisurely way through the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades.

Mullen is a so-called “ultralight” backpacker, so extreme in his self-imposed weight restrictions that he sought out cottage manufacturers producing some of the world’s lightest backpacks and tents. Most days, his load was less than 10 pounds, not including water.

The shirt that he set out in was the shirt that he finished in, he told me. His parents saw a picture of it and said, “We’re sending you a new shirt,” to which he replied, “No, you’re not. I don’t need a new shirt.”

Mullen, an Eagle Scout, went through 10 pairs of wool socks — “Two pairs would last me 500 miles,” he calculated — and countless tortillas, one of his staples.

Along the way, he would stop in the bigger towns to buy supplies, then ship boxes to himself at post offices up the trail, a common practice among through-hikers.

Mullen’s walk started on May 19 at the U.S.-Mexico border in Campo.

A few days later, his folks met him in Julian and drove him back to North County for a weekend of graduation festivities, which seemed to him a frustrating delay. His mind was on the thousands of miles ahead of him.

Within weeks, the weather had turned hot, baking swaths of Southern California.

On June 1, Mullen hiked down from Mt. San Jacinto into Cabazon, where the temperature peaked at 122 degrees. There, near the desert floor, he had one of his first encounters with the hospitable neighbors who line the Pacific Crest Trail.

“There’s one family who opens up their front yard to through-hikers,” he told me. “There’s a spigot where you can get water, and there are shade trees with benches. Coming down from Fuller Ridge, I stayed there for an hour and a half. I think I drank three liters of water in that sitting.”

By late June, when the landscape heaved up into the sharp peaks of the Sierra Nevada, Mullen had hit his stride.

He would wake up at sunrise, walk a few miles, pause for breakfast and keep walking until lunch. A few more breaks later, he would typically have covered 25 miles before pitching camp for the night.

Among his favorite memories are the various people he met on the way, from the “trail angels” who would unexpectedly provide food and water, to the other backpackers, who came with their own through-hiker nicknames.

One, who would become a good friend, was a San Diego man in his mid-20s whom the hikers called Action.

“I met him in Etna and spent the last thousand miles hiking with him,” Mullen said. “Someone had mentioned that I was doing big miles, and he wanted to do big miles … so he caught up to me and we hiked from there.”

Elsewhere on the path were Mama Bear and Monkey, a mother and her 9-year-old daughter, who reportedly became the youngest person to hike the trail in one continuous walk this year.

And then there was a guy called Magic Bag — Mullen was camping out with him just north of Belden one night when, “at 3:45 in the morning, we had a ranger pointing an AR-15 at me from five feet away and yelling, ‘Police! Wake up!’” Mullen recalled. “Apparently, there was a fire half a mile above us.”

They explained that they were hikers, not arsonists, but the ranger wasn’t buying it. “He thought we were lying … until he was like, ‘Where are your vehicles?’ And we said, ‘We walked here from Mexico.’”

Oregon brought the longest flat stretch of trail, but in Washington, another set of mountains awaited.

On the second-to-last day, Mullen came down with the flu but still managed to walk 22 miles.

Finally, on Sept. 21, Day 122, he saw it.

Canada.

“It was almost anticlimactic,” he recalled. “You get to the border, and it’s like, ‘Oh, the trail’s over.’ There’s a monument and some people clapping, but that’s about it. I still had nine miles to hike to the road.”

From the Canadian city of Manning Park, the nearest Greyhound stop, he rode into Vancouver to meet his parents and one of his four brothers. The family drove to see his grandparents in Seattle, then his dad and brother flew home.

But Jace Mullen would stay on the ground. He and his mother boarded a train headed south.

“I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to fly in two hours the exact same distance I just hiked in four months,’” he said.

Having conquered one of the longest foot paths in the world, Mullen is considering his next adventure.

Two other border-to- border trails beckon to the east — the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail — and he will be pursuing his wilderness emergency medical certification in Wyoming during the next few months.

Next year, he’ll attend St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, and the one feature he noted about the school is that it is situated near the Adirondack Mountains.

After 2,660 miles, it’s in his blood.

Recalling months of lonesome trudging, Mullen said it wasn’t all peachy. He figures every through-hiker considers giving up at some point.

“You’ll be really down on yourself and be like, ‘OK, I’m going to quit now,’” he said. “I made a five-mile wrong turn in the desert — just kept going further than I should have on a detour. But whenever that happens, something good also happens. You’ll be in a really, really bad mood going up a pass or something, then you’ll get up there and it’s just one of the most amazing views you’ve ever seen.”

Then he concluded, with a grin: “The Pacific Crest Trail makes you work for its love.”

Carlsbad ‘through hiker’ tackles border-to-border journey on foot

Know anyone with an interesting job, history or outlook? Contact Tom Pfingsten at fallbrooktown@gmail.com